What was there about this little brown-eyed girl that she should bewitch him like this? Bram, who flattered himself that he had his wits about him, who had kept himself haughtily free from love entanglements up to now, could not understand it. And the most amazing part of it all was that his feelings about her seemed to undergo an entire change every half-hour or so. At least a dozen times since his infatuation began he fancied himself quite cured, and able to laugh at himself and look down upon her. And then some fresh aspect of the little creature would strike him into fresh ecstasies, and he would find himself as much under the spell as ever.
Thus the first sight of her that evening in Mr. Cornthwaite’s study had thrilled him less than the announcement of her name. But, on the other hand, the touch of her hand so unexpectedly accorded, had quickened his feelings into a delicious frenzy, which lasted during the whole of his walk down into the town and out to the one small backroom in a grimy little red brick house where he lodged.
When Bram tried to think of Miss Biron soberly, to try to come to some sort of an estimate of her character, he was altogether at a loss. Her tears, her terrors, her smiles, her little airs, all seemed to succeed each other as rapidly as if she had been still a child. No emotion seemed to be able to endure in her volatile nature. He doubted, considering the matter in cold blood, whether this was a characteristic he admired; yet there it was, and his infatuation remained.
With all her limitations, whatever they might be; with all her faults, whatever they were, Miss Claire Biron had permanently taken her place in Bram’s narrow life as the nearest thing he had ever seen to an ideal woman, as the representative, for the time being at least, of that feminine creature, the necessity for whom he now began to understand, and who was to come straight into his heart and into his arms some day.
For, with all his ambitions, his reasonable hopes, Bram was as yet too modest to say to himself that this white-handed lady herself, this pearl among pebbles, was the prize for which he must strive; no, she only stood for that prize in his mind, in his heart, or so at least Bram told himself.
Bram thought about Miss Biron and her bibulous papa all night, for he scarcely slept, but with the morning light came fresh cares to occupy his thoughts.
It was his first day at his new employment in the office, and Bram, though he managed to hide all traces of what he felt under a stolid and matter-of-fact demeanor, felt by no means at his ease on his first entrance among the young gentlemen in Mr. Cornthwaite’s office.
He had put on his Sunday clothes, not without a pang at the extravagance in dress which his rise in life entailed. Nobody in the office seemed to have heard of his promotion, for the other clerks took no notice of him on his entrance, evidently supposing that he had been sent for, as was frequently the case, to take some message or to do some errand which required a trustworthy messenger.
When, after being called into the inner office, he came out again and took his place at a desk among the rest there was a burst of astonishment, amusement, and some contempt at his expense. And when the truth became known that he had come among them to stay, he straight from the coalyard and the mill and the shed outside, the feelings of all the young gentlemen found vent in “chaff” of a particularly merciless kind.
His accent, his speech, his dress, his look, his walk, his manner, all formed themes for the very easiest ridicule. Never before had they had such an opportunity, and they made the most of it. But if they thought to make life in the office unbearable for Bram they had reckoned without their host. Bram cased himself in an armor of stolid good humor, joined in the laugh against himself, and in affecting to try to assume their modes of speech and manner contrived to burlesque them at least as well as they had mimicked him.
And the end of it was that the fun languished all too soon for their wishes, and Bram when he left the office that afternoon, and wiped his face as he used to do after another sort of fiery ordeal, congratulated himself on having got through the day better than he had expected.
Christian Cornthwaite ran out after him, and slapped him on the back.
“Well, Elshaw,” cried he, “and how do you feel after it?”
“Much t’ same as Dan’l did when he’d come out of t’ den o’ lions, sir,” replied Bram grimly. “T’ young gentlemen in there,” and he pointed with his thumb over his shoulder, “doan’t find me grand enough for’em.”
“And so you want to go back to the works, Bram?”
“No fear, sir,” answered the new clerk dryly. “They’ll get used to me, or else maybe I shall get used to them. Or wi’ so many fine patterns round me maybe Ah shall be a polished gentleman myself presently.”
“No doubt of it, Bram. But you’ve been rather roughly treated. It ought to have been managed gradually, bit by bit, and then at last, when you took your place in the office, I ought to have sent you to my own tailor first, and had you properly rigged out.”
Bram looked down ruefully at his Sunday clothes.
“Ah felt a prince in these last evening,” he expostulated.
Christian laughed heartily.
“Well, they couldn’t beat you at the main things, Elshaw, at writing and spelling and calculating, eh?”
“No,” answered Bram complacently. “Ah could beat most of ’em there.”
As a matter of fact, Bram’s self-teaching, with the additional help of the night school in the winter, had so developed his natural capacity that he was as far ahead of his new companions intellectually as he was behind them in externals. Christian, who knew this, felt proud of his protégé.
“There are some more hints I want to give you,” said he, as he put his arm through that of his rough companion and walked with him up the street, with the good-natured familiarity which made him popular with everybody, but in the exercise of which he was very discriminating. “You will have to leave William Henry Street, or wherever it is you hang out, and take a room in a better neighborhood. And I will show you where you can go and dine. Look here,” he went on, stopping abruptly, “come up to me this evening, and we’ll have a talk over a pipe. You smoke, I suppose?”
“No, sir,” said Bram. “Ah don’t smoke. It’s too expensive. And Ah thank you kindly, but Ah’ve got a job out Hessel way this evening, and—”
Christian interrupted him with sudden interest.
“Out Hessel way? Why, that’s near Duke’s Farm. Will you take a note up for me to Miss Biron? She lives there. You can find the house easy enough.”
Bram, who had listened to these words with emotions he dared not express, agreed to take the note, but did not mention that it was to the farmhouse that his own errand took him.
All the happiness he had felt over the anticipated walk to Hessel evaporated as he watched Christian tear a leaf out of a note-book, scribble hastily on it in pencil, fold and addressed it to “Miss Claire Biron.”
But what a poor fool he was to be jealous? Could there be a question but that Mr. Christian Cornthwaite, with his good looks and his gayety, his position and his fortune, would make her a splendid mate?
Something like this Bram carefully dinned into himself as he took the note, and went home to his tea.
But for all that, he felt restless, dissatisfied, and unhappy as he set out after tea on his walk up to Hessel with that note from Christian Cornthwaite to Miss Biron in his pocket.
Although it was a hot evening, and the walk was uphill all the way, Bram got to the farm by half-past six, and came up to the door just as a woman, whom he decided must be the servant, came out of it.
She was about forty years of age, a little under the middle height, thickset of figure, and sallow of skin. But in her light gray eyes there was a shrewd but kindly twinkle; there was a promise of humor about her mouth and her sharply-pointed nose which made the countenance a decidedly attractive one.
She made no remark to Bram, but she turned and watched him as he approached the back door, and did not resume her walk until he had knocked and been admitted by Claire herself.
Miss Biron seemed to feel some slight embarrassment at the sight of him, and received his explanation that he had come to repaint her door with an assumption of surprise. The shrewd young man decided that the young lady had repented her unconventional friendliness of the preceding evening, and was inclined to look upon his visit as an intrusion. His manner, therefore, was studiously distant and respectful as he raised his cap from his head, gave the reason for his coming, and then said that he had brought a note for her from Mr. Christian Cornthwaite.
Claire blushed as she took it. Bram, who had brought his paint can and his brush, took off his coat, and began his task in silence, with just a sidelong look at the girl as she began to read the note.
At that moment the inner door of the kitchen opened, and Mr. Biron entered with a jaunty step, arranging a rosebud in his button-hole in quite a light comedy manner. Catching sight at once of Bram at work on the door, that young man observed that a slight frown crossed his face. After a momentary pause in his walk, he came on, however, as gayly as ever, and peeping over his daughter’s shoulder read the few words the note contained, and said at once—
“Well, you must go, dear; you must go.”
Claire blushed hotly, and crumpled up the note.
“I—I don’t want to. I would rather not,” said she in a low voice.
“Oh, but that’s nonsense,” retorted he good-humoredly. “Chris is a good fellow, a capital fellow. Put on your hat, and don’t be a goose. I’ll see that the young man at the door has his beer.”
Bram heard this, and his face tingled, but he said nothing. He perceived, indeed, from a certain somewhat feminine spitefulness in Mr. Biron’s tone, that the words were said with the intention of annoying him.
Claire appeared to hesitate a moment, then quickly making up her mind she said—“All right, father, I’ll go,” and disappeared through the inner door.
Theodore, without any remark to Bram, followed her.
In a few moments Bram heard a movement in the straw of the farmyard behind him, and looking round saw that Claire was standing behind him with her hat and gloves on, and was apparently debating in her own mind whether she would utter something which was in her thoughts. He saluted her respectfully with a stolid face. Then she began to speak, reddened, stammered, and finally made a dash for it.
“Where do you live?” she asked suddenly. “I mean—is it far from here?”
“No, miss; it’s over yon,” answered Bram mendaciously, nodding in the direction of the cottages on the brow of the hill.
“Then would you very much mind—” and Bram could see that her breast was heaving under the influence of some strong emotion, “keeping your eye upon this place until I come back? You know all about it,” she went on, with a burst of uneasy confidence, “so that it’s no use my minding that. And when my father’s left alone—well, well, you know,” said she, blushing crimson, and keeping her eyes down. “And Joan has to go home to her husband and children at night. And—and I’m afraid when he gets excited, you know, that he’ll set the place on fire. He nearly did last night. You see, my poor father has a great many worries, and a very little affects his head—since that sabre cut in India.”
The humility, nay, the humiliation in her tone, touched Bram to the quick. He promised at once that he would take care that Mr. Biron did no harm either to himself or to the house while she was away, and received her grateful, breathless, little whisper of “Thank you; oh, thank you,” with outward stolidity, but with considerable emotion.
Then she ran off, and he went quietly on with his work.
It took him a very short time to finish putting on the one coat of paint, which was all he could do that night; and then, as Mr. Biron had not appeared again, Bram thought he had better take a look round and see what that gentleman was doing. So he took up his paint-can, and, leaving the door open to dry, made his way round to the front of the house, and peeped cautiously in at the lower windows; and in one of them he saw a couple of empty champagne bottles, with the corks lying beside them, and an overturned glass on the table.
“T’owd rascal hasn’t wasted much time,” thought Bram to himself, as he stared at the evidences of Mr. Biron’s solitary dissipation, and looked about for the toper himself. But Theodore was not in the room. Neither was he in the room on the other side of the front door, as Bram hastened to ascertain. Perhaps he had had sense enough to make his way upstairs to his own room to sleep off the effects of the wine.
This seeming to be a probable explanation of his disappearance, Bram was inclined to trouble himself no further on that head, when a faint noise, which seemed to proceed from the bowels of the earth, attracted his attention. There was a grating under the window of the room which appeared to be the dining-room, and in the cellar which was thus dimly lighted some one appeared to be moving about.
Bram, in his character of sworn guardian of the house, thought it best to investigate, so he ran round to the back, entered by the open door, and found a trap-door in the hall just outside the kitchen door.
A strong smell of paraffin was the first thing he noticed as he looked down the ladder; the next was the sight of Mr. Biron calmly emptying a can of the oil upon the loose straw and firewood which the cellar contained.
Startled by the sudden light and noise above, Mr. Biron dropped the can as the trap-door opened, and then Bram saw that in his left hand he held a box of matches.
“Tha fool, tha drunken fool, coom up wi’ ye!” shouted Elshaw, as he stretched down a strong arm and pulled Theodore up by his coat collar.
Bram had expected his captive to stagger, and so he did. He had expected him to stammer and to stare; and he did these things also. But Bram had seen a good deal of drunkenness in his time, and he was not easy to deceive.
Suddenly holding the slender little man at arm’s length from him, and looking steadily into his eyes with a black frown on his own face, he shouted in a voice which might have roused the village—
“Why, you d——d old rascal, what villainy have you been up to? You’re as sober as I am!”
When Mr. Theodore Biron found himself pulled up the steps of his cellar, and roughly shaken by the very person who had disarmed him on the previous evening, his rage was such that he lost his usual airy self-possession completely, and betrayed himself in the most unworthy manner.
“Who are you, sir? And how dare you interfere with me in this way?” stammered he, as he tried in vain to release himself from the determined grasp of the young clerk.
“Coom up to t’ light, and then you’ll see who Ah am,” said Bram, as with a strong arm he dragged the little man up the steps, and, shutting the trap-door, folded his arms and turned to look at him.
“Do you dare to justify this outrage, this—this burglarious entry upon my premises? The second in two days? Do you dare to justify it?” said Theodore haughtily.
“Ay,” said Bram surlily, “Ah’m going to give information to t’ police. Ah’m goin’ to tell them to keep an eye upon you, Mr. Biron, and not to be surprised if t’ house is burnt down; since you’ve got odd ways of amusing yourself with matches and paraffin, and with candles left ablaze near light curtains. Ah suppose you’re insured, Mr. Biron?”
“Whatever you suppose has nothing to do with the question,” retorted Mr. Biron, whose little thin cheeks were pink with indignation, and whose light eyes were flashing with annoyance and malignity. “Nobody is likely to pay much attention to the statements of a man who is evidently a loafer and a thief.”
“A thief!” shouted Bram with a menacing gesture, which had the effect of sending Theodore promptly into the little dining-room behind him. “Well, we’ll see whether t’ word of t’ thief won’t be taken against yours, Mr. Biron.”
There was a pause. Theodore from behind the table in the little dining-room, where he was twirling his moustache with a trembling white hand, looked at him with apprehension, and presently laughed in an attempt to recover his usual light-hearted ease of manner.
“Come, come,” said he, “this is carrying a joke too far, for I suppose it was intended for a joke—this intrusion upon my premises—and that you never had any real thought of carrying anything away. I remember your face now; you are one of the workmen at my cousin’s place, Cornthwaite’s Iron-Works.”
Bram, who was not unwilling to make terms with Miss Biron’s father, stared at him sullenly.
“Ah’m not one of t’ workmen now. Ah’m in t’ office,” said he.
Mr. Biron raised his eyebrows; he did not seem pleased. It had in fact occurred to him that this young man was employed as a sort of spy by the Cornthwaites, with whom he himself was by no means an acceptable person.
He smiled disagreeably.
“One of the clerks, eh? One of the smart young men who nibble pens in the office?”
“Ay, but ma smartness isn’t outside, Mr. Biron.”
“I see. Great genius—disdains mere appearance and all that.”
Bram said nothing. Theodore’s sneers hurt him more than any he had ever been subjected to before. He felt, in spite of his contempt for the airy-mannered scoundrel, that he himself stood at a disadvantage, with his rough speech and awkward movements, with the dapper little man in front of him. The consciousness that he himself would be reckoned of no account compared to Theodore Biron by the very men who despised the latter and respected himself was the strongest spur he had ever felt towards self-improvement.
“And what brings a person of your intellectual calibre into our humble neighborhood?” pursued Theodore in the same tone.
“Ah’m looking for lodgings up this way,” answered Bram shortly.
The idea had come to him that evening that, since he had been told to change his lodgings, he would settle in the neighborhood of Hessel.
As he had expected, Mr. Biron did not look pleased.
“And you are making yourself at home in advance!” suggested he dryly.
“Well, sir, you needn’t see more of me than you feel inclined to,” retorted Bram.
And, with a curt salutation, he turned on his heel and went out of the house by the back way, through the kitchen and the still open outer door.
He went up the hill towards the row of cottages on the summit, and made inquiries which resulted in his finding the two modest rooms he wanted in the end house of all, within a stone’s throw of a ruin so strange-looking that Bram made a tour of inspection of the ramshackle old building before returning to the town.
This ruin had once been a country mansion of fair size and of some importance, but the traces of its architectural beauties were now few and far apart. Of the main building only one side wall retained enough of its old characteristics to claim attention; at the top of the massive stonework a Tudor chimney, of handsome proportions, rose in incongruous stateliness above the decaying roof which had been placed over a row of cottages, which, built up within the old wall, had grown ruinous in their turn, and were now shut up and deserted.
At the back of this heterogeneous pile and a little distance away from it, another long and massive stone wall, with a Tudor window out of which once Wolsey had looked, had now become the chief prop and mainstay of another row of buildings, one of which was a school, another a chapel, while a third was a now disused stable.
And in the shelter of these ruins and remains of greatness a tall chimney, a cluster of sheds, and a pile of grass-grown trucks marked the spot where a now disused coal mine added a touch of fantastic desolation to the scene.
Bram went all round the pit-mouth and surveyed the town of Sheffield, with its dead yellow lights and its patches of blackness, like an inky sea bearing a fleet of ill-lighted boats on its breast in a Stygian mist. He thought he should like this evening walk out of the smoke and the lick of the fiery tongues, even without the occasional peeps he should get at Miss Biron.
But he hardly knew, perhaps, how much the thought of her, of her dancing eyes, her rapid movements like the sweep of a bird’s wing, had to do with his feeling.
He went back round the pit’s mouth, making his way with some difficulty in the darkness over the rough stones with which the place was thickly strewn.
And as he came to the remains of the old mansion he heard the laugh of Christian Cornthwaite, a little subdued, but clearly recognizable, not very far from his ears.
Bram straightened himself with a nasty shock. By the direction from which the sound came, he knew that Christian was in the ruin itself; and that he was not there by himself was plain. Who then was with him? Bram did not want to find an answer to this question; at least he told himself that he did not. The dilapidated shell of the old mansion was not the place where a lady would meet her lover. Bram had peeped into one of the deserted cottages on his way to the pit’s mouth, and had seen that, boarded up as doors and windows were, there were ruinous crannies and spaces through which a tramp or vagrant could creep to a precarious shelter.
Christian, who loved an adventure, amorous or otherwise, was evidently pursuing one now.
Bram walked down the hill, passed the cottage where he had engaged his new rooms, whistling to himself, and telling himself persistently that he was not wondering where Miss Biron had gone to that evening. And then he became suddenly mute, for, turning his head at the sound of a light footstep behind him, he saw Claire herself coming down the hill at a breathless rate.
She passed him without seeing him. Her head was bent low, and her feet seemed to fly. Bram’s heart seemed to stop beating as he watched her.
But he would not allow that he suspected her of being the person who had been in the ruined building with Christian Cornthwaite. It was true that Christian had sent her a note in which he had evidently asked her to meet him; it was true that she had acceded to the request, at her father’s instigation.
But although Bram clenched his teeth in thinking of Theodore, and felt a sudden impulse of fierce indignation against that gentleman, he would not acknowledge to himself that it was possible to connect her with an act inconsistent with the modesty of a gentlewoman.
He was not far behind when Theodore, lively, bright, and entirely recovered from the discomposure into which Bram’s unseemly violence had thrown him, came forth from the farmyard to meet his daughter.
“My dear child, I was getting quite anxious about you. Where’s Chris? I thought he would have seen you back home.”
“I left him—at the top of the hill, papa,” answered Claire in a demure voice.
And she ran past Theodore into the house.
Then Theodore, whose eyes were sharp, recognized Bram. And there flashed through his brain, always active on his own behalf, the suspicion that this presumptuous young man might be spying not so much on his employer’s account, as upon his own. The idea struck Theodore as preposterously amusing; but at the same time he thought that something might be made out of the foolish fellow’s infatuation, if it indeed existed.
“Well, and how about the lodgings?” said he with cheerful condescension, as Bram came nearer.
“Ah’ve found some,” replied Bram shortly.
“And what brings you so far afield?” went on Theodore more urbanely than ever. “May I hazard the conjecture that there’s a lady in the case?”
The young man was quick to seize this suggestion, which he saw might be used most usefully hereafter.
“Ay, sir, that’s about reght,” said he. “But she doan’t live here,” he went on, making up his story with great deliberation as he spoke. “She lives miles away in t’ country; but Ah thought Ah’d better settle out of t’ town myself, before Ah went courting.”
Theodore was disappointed, but he did not show it.
“Well,” said he, “we shall see something of you now and then, I daresay.”
And he nodded good-bye in the most affable manner.
Bram saluted respectfully, but he was too shrewd to be much impressed, in the manner Theodore intended, by this change towards him.
Away from the glamour cast upon him by the fact of Claire’s presence in his vicinity, Bram had sense enough to reflect that the less he saw of Miss Biron and her shifty father the better it would be for him. He did not say this to himself in so many words; but the knowledge was borne strongly in upon him all the same. There were forces in those two persons, differently as he esteemed them, against which he felt that he had no defence ready. Theodore was cunning and grasping; his daughter was, as Bram knew, used by her father as a tool in his unscrupulous hands. Deep as Bram’s compassion for the charming girl was, and his admiration, he had the strength of mind to live for months in her neighborhood without making any attempt to speak to her.
He saw her, indeed, morning after morning, and evening after evening, on his way down to the works and on his way back. For the road from his lodgings lay past the farm, where Miss Biron was always busy with her poultry in the morning, and working in her garden at night.
It was not often that she saw Bram, but when she did she had always a smile and a nod for him; never more than that though, even when he lingered a little, in the hope that she would throw him a word.
Bram saw Theodore sometimes, lounging in a garden chair, with a cigarette in his mouth; and sometimes Chris Cornthwaite would be with him, or walking by Claire’s side round the lawn, chattering to her while she pottered about her late autumn flowers.
This sight always sent a sharp pang through Bram’s heart; for he had conceived the idea that Christian, nice fellow though he was, might be too volatile a person to value Claire’s affection as she deserved.
Claire, on her side, seemed to be happy enough with Christian. Her pretty laugh rang out gayly; and Bram, even while he laughed at himself for a sentimental folly, found himself praying that the poor child might not be deceived in her hopes of happiness with her volatile lover.
For Christian, amiable and devoted as he might be with Claire, had not, as Bram knew, given up his amiability and devotion to other girls; and after the second or third time that Bram had seen him at Hessel Farm, he mentioned casually to the newly promoted clerk that he did not want his father to hear of his visits there.
Whereat Bram looked grave, and foresaw trouble in the near future.
The March winds had begun to blow fiercely on the high ground above Hessel, when Theodore Biron at last discovered a use to which to put his young neighbor. Would Bram do some marketing for him in the town? Bram was rather surprised at the request, for an excuse for going into the town was what Theodore liked to have. But when he found that the task he was expected to undertake was the purchase of one pound’s worth of goods for the sum of five shillings, which was all the cash Theodore trusted him with, Bram, when Theodore had turned his back upon him, stood looking thoughtfully at the two half-crowns in his hand.
And while he was doing so Claire, who had seen the transaction from the window, ran out of the house and came up with him. As usual, the girl’s presence threw a spell upon him, and put to flight all the saner ideas he had conceived as to the desirability of trying to conquer his own infatuation. She came up smiling, but there was anxiety in her face.
“What has papa been saying to you?” she asked imperiously.
“He wants me to get some things for him in the town,” said Bram straightforwardly. “But Ah’m such a bad hand at marketing—that—that Ah’m afraid——”
Claire blushed, and interrupted him impatiently.
“He’s not given you money enough, of course. He never does. He doesn’t understand. Men never do. They think everything can be got for a few pence for the housekeeping, and that one is wasteful and extravagant. Give me the money; I’ll see about the things.”
“No, you won’t, Miss Claire,” said Bram composedly, as he put the two half-crowns in his pocket. “You’ve put me on my mettle. Ah’m going to see what Ah can do, and show you that the men can give the ladies a lesson in marketing, after all.”
But Claire did not reply in the same light tone. She looked up in his face with an expression of shame and alarm in her eyes, which touched him keenly. With a little catch in her breath, she tried to protest, to forbid. Then she read something in Bram’s eyes which stung her, some gleam of pity, of comprehension. She broke off short, burst into tears, and turned abruptly away.
Bram stood by the gate for a few seconds, with his head hung down, and a guilty, miserable look on his face. Then, as nobody came out to him, he slunk quietly away.
It was with some diffidence that Bram presented himself at the farmhouse door that evening. He went through the farmyard to the back door, and gave a modest knock. It was Joan, the servant, who opened the door to him, and Bram, as his own eyes met those of the middle-aged Yorkshire woman, had a strong sense that she read him, as he would have expressed it, “like a book.” Indeed Joan could read character in a face much more easily than she could read a printed page. Having been born long before the days of School Boards, she had been accustomed from her early youth to find her entertainment not in cheap fiction, but in the life around her; so that she was on the whole much better educated than women of her class are now, having stored her mind with the facts gained by experience and observation.
She looked at him not unkindly.
“Ah,” she began, with a nod of recognition, as if she had known him well for a year instead of now speaking to him for the first time, “Ah thowt it was you. Mister Christian he comes in by t’ front door.”
Bram did not like this comparison. It suggested, in the first place, that Joan had an instinct that there was some sort of rivalry between himself and Mr. Christian. It suggested also the basis on which they respectively stood.
“I’ve brought some things Miss Biron wanted,” he began, forgetting that he had been commissioned, not by the young lady, but by her father.
Joan smiled a broad smile of shrewd amusement. Bram wished she would mind her own business.
“Weel, here she be to see them hersen,” said she, as the inner door of the kitchen opened, and Claire came in.
“Oh, Joan, papa wants you to——” began she.
Then she saw Bram, and stopped.
“I’ve brought the things, Miss Claire,” said he in a shy voice.
Miss Biron had stopped short and changed color. She now came forward slowly, and passing Joan, held open the door for him to enter.
“Oh, please come in,” she said in a very demure voice, from which it was impossible to tell whether she was pleased or annoyed, grateful or the reverse, for his good offices.
Bram entered, and proceeded to place his enormous parcel on the deal table, and to cut the string. He was passing through the refining process very rapidly; and, already, in the clothes which he had chosen under Chris Cornthwaite’s eye, he looked too dignified a person to engage in the duties of a light porter.
Claire, more demure than ever, spoke as if she was much shocked.
“Oh, have you carried that heavy parcel? Oh, I’m so sorry. It is very, very kind of you, but——”
She stopped, stammering a little. Joan, who was standing with her hands on her hips, admiring the scene, laughed scornfully.
“Eh, but it’s a grand thing to be yoong! Ah can’t get no smart yoong gen’lemen to carry my parcels for me, not if they was to see me breakin’ ma back.”
“Why, you’ve got a husband to carry them for you,” said Claire quickly, and not very happily; for Joan laughed again.
“Ay, Miss Claire, but they doan’t do it after they’re married; so do you make t’ moast o’ your time.”
And Joan, with an easy nod which was meant to include both the young people, went through into the hall with leisurely steps.
As she had left behind her a slight feeling of awkward reserve, Claire felt bound to begin with an apology for her.
“She’s rather rough, but, oh, so good,” said she.
“Then if she’s good to you, I can forgive all her roughness,” said Bram.
And the next minute he wished he had not said it.
There was a momentary pause, during which Bram busied himself with the strings of his parcels. With a rapid eye, Miss Biron ran over the various things which the outer wrapper had contained. Then, with a bright flush in her face, she took her purse from her pocket.
“How much do I owe you?” she asked quickly. “Three boxes of candles, eighteenpence. Two boxes of sardines, two and sixpence. Box of figs, half-a-crown——”
Bram interrupted her hotly. “One and ninepence, the figs,” cried he, “and the sardines were only ninepence a tin.”
“Then they are not the best.”
“Yes, they are.”
This colloquy, short and simple as it was, had left the combatants, for such they seemed, panting with excitement. Miss Biron looked at the young man narrowly and proceeded in a tone of much haughtiness——
“I must beg you to tell me really what they cost, whatever my father said. He knows nothing about the price of things, but”—and the young lady gave him a look which was meant to impress him with her vast experience in these matters—“I do.”
Bram, afraid of offending her still further, and conscious of the delicate ground upon which he stood, began submissively to add up the various items, deducting a few pence where he dared, until the total of nineteen shillings and fourpence was reached. Miss Biron opened her purse rather nervously, and took out a small handful of silver, a very small handful, alas!
“Let me see. Papa gave you five shillings——”
“And then the ten he gave me as I went out by the gate after you’d gone up,” pursued Bram, imperturbably.
“Ten!” echoed Claire, sharply. “Papa gave you ten shillings more!”
“Half-a-sovereign, yes,” replied Bram, mendaciously. “You said he hadn’t given me enough, you know, so he gave me the ten shillings. You ask him.”
Claire shook her head.
“It’s no use asking papa anything,” she said with a sigh. Then she added, suddenly raising her head and flashing her eyes, “I must trust to your honor, Mr. Elshaw.”
The sound of his name uttered by her lips gave Bram a ridiculous thrill of pleasure. He had supposed she only knew him as “Bram,” and the thought that she had taken the trouble to inquire his name was a delicious one.
“Yes,” said he simply, in no wise troubled by the doubt she expressed. “Well, that’s fifteen shillings, and you owe me four shillings and fourpence.”
She gave him a quick glance of suspicion, and then counted out her poor little hoard of sixpences and coppers. She had only three shillings and sevenpence.
“I owe you,” said she, as she put the money into his hand, “ninepence, which I must pay you next week. But, please, I want you to promise,” she earnestly went on, “not to do any more shopping for papa. He is so extravagant,” and she tried to laugh merrily, “that I have to keep some check upon him, or we should soon be ruined.”
“All right, Miss Claire, I’ll do just as you wish, of course. But it’s a great pleasure to me to be able to do any little thing for you. You know, for one thing,” he added quickly, fancying that she might think this presumptuous, “that Mr. Christian was the person who got me moved up out of the works, so I am doubly glad to do anything for—for anybody he takes an interest in.”
Over Claire’s sensitive face there passed a shadow at the mention of Christian’s name.
“Christian Cornthwaite is my cousin, you know,” said she. “He often talks of you. He says you are very clever, and he is very proud of having discovered you, as he calls it.”
“It was very good of him,” said Bram. “I’m afraid I don’t do him much credit; I’m such a rough sort of chap.”
Miss Biron looked at him rather shyly, and laughed.
“Well, you were, just a little. But you are—are——”
“A little bit better now?” suggested Bram modestly.
“Well, I was going to say a great deal better, only I was afraid it sounded rather rude. What I meant was that—that——”
“Well, I should like to hear what it was you meant.”
“Well, that you speak differently, for one thing.”
“But I slip back sometimes,” said Bram, laughing and blushing, just as she laughed and blushed. “It’s so hard not to say ‘Ah’ when I ought to say ‘I.’ I’m getting on, I know, but it’s like walking on eggs all the time.”
Then they both laughed again, and at this point the door opened and Mr. Biron came in.
He was very amiable, and insisted on Bram’s coming into the dining-room with him. As Bram neither smoked nor drank, however, Theodore’s offer of whisky and cigars was thrown away. But Bram sat down and made a very good audience, laughing at his host’s stories and jokes, so that he found himself forced into accepting an invitation to come in again on the following evening.
By Theodore’s wish it became Bram’s frequent custom to spend an hour at the farmhouse in the evening; and the young man soon availed himself of the intimacy thus begun to make himself useful to Claire in a hundred ways. He would chop wood in the yard, mend broken furniture, fetch things from the town, and bargain for her for her poultry, suggest and help to carry out reformations in her management of the dairy—doing everything unobtrusively, but making his shrewd common sense manifest in a hundred practical ways.
And Claire was grateful, rather shy of taking advantage of his kindness, but giving him such reward of smiles and thanks as more than repaid him for labor which was pleasure indeed.
Sometimes Christian Cornthwaite would be at the farm, and on these occasions Bram saw little of Claire, who was always monopolized by her cousin. Christian was as devoted as Bram could have wished; but, if Theodore thought that the young man delayed his coming, he did not scruple to send his daughter on some excuse to call at Holme Park, always refusing Bram’s humble offers to take the message or to escort Claire.
The one thing Bram could have wished about Claire was that she should be less submissive to her unscrupulous father in matters like this. He would have had her refuse to go up to Holme Park, where she was always received, as Bram knew, with the coldness which ought to have been reserved for Theodore. And especially did Bram feel this now that he knew, from Theodore’s own lips, that the notes he sent by his daughter’s hand to Josiah Cornthwaite were seldom answered. It made Bram’s blood boil to know this, and that in the face of this fact Theodore continued to send his daughter up to his rich cousin’s house on begging errands.
Bram was in the big farm kitchen by himself one cool September evening, busily engaged in making a new dressing-table for Claire out of some old boxes. He had his coat off, and was sawing away, humming to himself as he did so, when, turning to look for something he wanted, he found, to his surprise, that Claire, whom he had not seen that evening, was sitting in the room.
She had taken her hat off, and was sitting with it in her lap, so silently, so sadly, that Bram, who was not used to this mood in the volatile girl, was struck with astonishment.
For a moment he stood, saw in hand, looking at her without speaking.
“Miss Claire!” exclaimed he at last.
“Well?”
“When did you come in? I never saw you come in!”
“No. I didn’t want you to see me. I don’t want any one to see me. So I can’t go in because papa has the door open, and he would catch me on the way upstairs.”
“What’s wrong with you, Miss Claire?”
Bram had come over to her and was leaning on the table and speaking with so much kindness in his voice that the girl’s eyes, after glancing up quickly and meeting his, filled with tears.
“Oh, everything. One feels like that sometimes. Everybody does, I suppose.”
Bram’s heart ached for the girl. He guessed that she had been to Holme Park on the usual errand, and that she had been coldly received. He could hear Theodore strumming on the piano in the drawing-room. The piano was so placed that the player had a good view of the open door, and Bram knew that Theodore had chosen this method of filling up the time till his daughter’s return. Apparently he had now caught with his sharp ears the sound of voices in the kitchen, for the playing ceased, and a moment later he presented himself at the door with a smiling face.
“Good-evening, Elshaw. Heard you sawing away, but didn’t like to disturb you till I heard another voice, and guessed that I might. Any answer to my note, Claire?”